Odia Ofeimun
I am a Republican, not a Royalist. But, in a country in which we have
all conceded the coexistence of Republican and Royalist values, it
should be considered quite unseemly to watch one set of the interacting
values being rough-handled, muddied or treated with improper decorum
without feeling a need to intervene on behalf of rectitude. I have been
so challenged since the eruption of the controversy ignited by the
Alake of Egbaland, Oba Adedotun Gbadebo, who allowed himself to do a
ranking of Yoruba Obas that placed the Oba of Benin as third in the
hierarchy. In one sense, as Chief David Edebiri, the Esogban of Benin,
immediately retorted, it is wrong to rank the Oba of Benin among Yoruba
Obas because the Oba of Benin is not a Yoruba and therefore cannot be
placed on a list of Yoruba Obas. I call it 'in a sense' because the
Esogban's position may be disputed on the grounds, as will soon be
clear, that there is too much siblinghood between Yoruba and Benin
traditional rulers for the ethnic difference between them to be rendered
in cast-iron terms.
The special relationship between Yoruba and Benin obas, not unlike the
relationship between Benin and Onitsha kings, or between Lagos and Edo
kings, makes it all the more impolitic to do a ranking of the Benin
monarchy in Yoruba royal affairs without abiding by certain
inter-subjective and shared norms. And let me note, very quickly, that
it is the presence of such norms that makes it quite normal for Chief
Edebiri to put the Oba of Benin as Number One without appearing to
contradict himself. In his response to the Alake, Chief Edebiri has
argued, quite simply, that the term oba was not used to describe Yoruba
kings until the Oba of Benin got there. This may well be disputed.
Except that it has the merit of being close to verisimilitude when he
argues that the king of Ibadan was called Olu, the king of Abeokuta was
called Alake, the king of Oyo was called Alafin; only the Benin monarch
was Oba. With the backing of glotto-cultural studies, however, we should
be able to impute that the term, oba, is a root word shared by both
the Yoruba and the Edo languages and that among the sixteen kings that
reigned in Ile-Ife before the arrival of Oduduwa's party, many had oba
as prefix to their names. To say this amounts to jumping ahead of the
argument a little. But let me add, for those who are not familiar with
this piece of anthropology, that Oduduwa, the acknowledged
founder-ancestor, the progenitor of the Yoruba nationality, was a
stranger who met a historical line of obas in Ile Ife, the last of whom
was Obatala, the leader of the Igbo, the autochthons, later deified as
god of creativity or creation, sometimes synced with Orunmila, for
wisdom. Make your pick.
Let me also add that, from the studies of the Ifa divination system
made by several scholars, as imbibed from traditional Ifa devotees, it
is those sixteen elders whom Oduduwa met in Ife that provided the
sub-structure of Ifa as a formal system of wisdom into which people
could be initiated in the way that we all go to tertiary institutions to
learn philosophy, jurisprudence and mathematics. Or mathemagics, if you
like. It is of very grave significance in this narrative that we should
acknowledge that the Ifa Divination system, before the intervention of
Islam, Christianity, and Lord Frederick Lugard's balkanisation and
regionalisation of traditional gnosis, was based on the existential
patterns or prowess of the sixteen elders, or kings, who formed the
planks upon which the wisdom of the people, by ritual accretions, was
organised.
Every good student of Ifa should know that in the Edo Divination system
of Igwega, two of the sixteen elders have been displaced by Edo
personages who are not to be found in the Ife version as designed by
Agbonmiregun, the Master, who went from Ekiti to Ile Ife and established
the rounded system of Ifa Divination as passed by other masters between
the Edo, Nupe, Igala and Yoruba devotees. It can be imagined that, as a
matter of ritual, they gathered at Ife, which was quite the centre of
their world, for a divination that transcended ethnicities but was based
on a common worship of the earth mother, Efa. All the forest peoples,
from Dahomey to the Cameroon mountains, across the Nri of Igboland and
past Ogoja, were devotees of one form or other of Ifa Divination.
The historian, Ade Obayemi, has imputed that so many concepts in Yoruba
Ifa, which some devotees may regard as mumbo jumbo, are actually Nupe
terms that proper glotto-cultural analysis and translation could redeem.
This partly explains why Benin Kings could induct or abduct and adopt
Igbo medicinemen who became part of the common national culture, as
Egharevba, the Benin historian vouchsafes. What a linguistic,
glotto-cultural analysis tells us is that, in Ile-ife, before the
dispersal occasioned by Oduduwa's emergence, the Yoruba language, as one
among many in the Kwa language complex, was once the same language with
others including Igbo and that they still share common root words
beyond the simple ones like Omi and miri.
So if Chief Edebiri's resort to linguistic analysis wont help a
resolution of the ranking of the Yoruba obas, what will? I suppose it is
the discomfort of trying to answer such a question, and the fear of
being wrong-footed in a bid to dabble into what appears to be quite
esoteric, that has warded off many of the dignitaries who have been
asked by journalists to respond to the controversy. Some of them think
it a needless controversy that could detract from more worthwhile issues
of the moment. True, there are crying problems that our society needs
to face and resolve. Some political entrepreneurs who require a united
front in order not to disperse collective energies have been quick to
advise against worsening of the already existing inter-ethnic divisions
in our midst. Somehow, they do not consider that to ignore the
controversy or down play its driven logic, could harden the ranking that
has been attempted and, to that extent, make it quite affirmable with
the accretion of time. Of course, those who are already convinced of its
veracity and have lived in the shadow of its ritualised affirmation,
all their lives, would want the ranking to remain as they know it.
Hence, they act bored by the controversy and would therefore wish that
we move on quickly to other matters. Unfortunately, (or fortunately,
depending on how you see it) the controversy won't go away.
At any rate, this is not the first time it has visited or reared its
head. The ranking, as it happens, is so deeply rooted in the ethnic
unconscious of some people that there is good reason for the palace in
Benin City to wish, with each eruption of the controversy, to put the
records, or lack of records, straight. It happens to be the case that
the ranking of the obas takes on a life of its own within every effort
to build a sense of common nationality among Yoruba people. Every bid by
the Yoruba to unite under a common leader or in conformity with a
presumption of common ancestry, has always yielded one form of such
ranking or the other.
It has become part of a modernist or modernising project which
nation-builders escape only when they are able to put the knowledge
industry at the centre of their quest. Especially, with the
establishment of the Egbe Omo Oduduwa on home ground in 1948, the
business of building up such a knowledge industry, creating a formal
historiography to get it right, has been part of every bid at
nation-building. With bounding successes in research and publications,
everything seemed to be going fine before the regression that came with
political crisis in the sixties and the virtual abandonment of the
enlightenment project that Obafemi Awolowo is still rightly praised for.
Frankly, it has since boiled down to the old saw about putting things
in books if you want to hide them from Africans. Otherwise, too many
scholars, Yoruba and non-Yoruba, in our midst, unrecognised by a
thoroughly philistine, anti-enlightenment elite, have sweated their
lives out researching and correcting the whimsical, myth-suffused
folklore and the ultra-parochial rendering of the past, that many of our
leaders regard as history, with a capital H. The result is that, with
so much cultural illiteracy abounding, we all go mucking around with
woolly and crooked thoughts about ourselves and our neighbours to the
detriment of social and political projects that could save our part of
the world from backwardness and decay. Specific to the ranking of the
Yoruba obas: So deeply ingrained is the ranking among not only the Obas,
but many Yoruba big wigs! The palace in Benin City has had to be
effusively vigilant, on perpetual watch, as it were, rebutting every
indication of a resurgence of the claim.
It happens to be a claim that many, including Professors of History,
lacking the requisite cultural literacy have humoured with shrugs and
incipient concordance in order not to be wrong-footed by popular
opinionating. Surely, being only too willing to wish the sleeping dog of
history back to sleep whenever it is roused by controversy, they
wittingly or unwittingly, contribute to allowing the already stated
position to remain the unspoken but reigning truth of the matter. The
implication, even if unintended, is that they withdraw enthusiasm from
the need to clear the mushy debris of insupportable folklore that
masquerades as history. They contribute to the death of historical
consciousness in our part of the world.
What must be borne in mind in the case of the Alake's recent
pronouncement on the ranking of Yoruba obas, is that it happened during a
visit by the newly crowned Ooni of Ife, Oba Enitan Ogunwusi, who has
been making commendable representations on behalf of Yoruba unity since
his elevation to the throne. His definitive un-jinxing of the hiatus
between the Ife and Oyo monarchies, by a visit that dammed several
decades of distancing, has raised enormous and quite salutary vibes
across the country. Much beyond Yorubaland. One wishes that it was
actually always the case that we had obas, like him, who would stop
distracting their people with arguments about the past that divide
rather than bring people together.
As such, it was to be expected that visits between kings of different
communities swearing descent from a common ancestor would yield some
brag, and even some luxuriating in sheer grandiloquence, for the sake of
ethnic pride and national self-glorification. Quite understandable. In
such situations, all traditional cultures in the world, seeking to have
their day in the sun, have tended always to confer even other-worldly
features on their monarchs as a form of self promotion for the tribe,
nation or race. In particular, new Obas have tended to attract a hyper
inflation of oriki and other panegyrics in order to match the character
sketch of an igbakejiorisa, a virtual divinity.
Such moments in history inspire what, in his essay on The Monarchical
Tendency in African Political Culture, Ali Mazrui describes in the
context of the quest for aristocratic effect, the personalisation of
authority, the sacralisation of authority and the quest for a royal
historical identity. In the case of the Ooni Ogunwusi, until the
Alake's 'goof' which the Benin Palace has rebutted, something ethereally
all-accommodating, sanguine, and salutary seemed to be attending to his
forthright bid for unity wherever he went. Now, clearly, what has been
pulled out of the bag by the Alake, even if returned to the bag, can no
longer spell in a way that will make all comfortable.
It calls to be taken in hand and dealt with in a manner that will not
continue to put the Nigerian Project at the mercy of poorly designed
ethnic projects. Indeed, now that the Alake, through his media
spokesman, has insisted that his ranking of the obas is bam on the mark,
and not retractable, it calls for a serious engagement of the issues
beyond reliance on work-a-day folklore. To be sure, his insistence may
be quite benign in the context of intra-ethnic muscle-flexing which may
cause only mild grating, such as when the Alafin of Oyo haggles with the
Ooni over decades, as to who is superior. But when the matter goes
inter-cultural, applied in a multi-ethnic situation, it can get truly
pernicious, with grave repercussions; enough to unsettle the balance of
respect between neighbours. This is especially so when all the
verifiable propositions to the contrary are dismissed without a second
thought; such that the cooping of ethnic self-assurance, on the one
hand, is turned into a means of thumbing noses at or down-grading
neighbours who, on the other hand, have been no less illustrious from
antiquity to the present.
The core issue is that, whether intended or not, the ranking of the
obas across ethnic boundaries implies an attempt at a form of suzerainty
of one ethnic group or nationality over another. By imputing a vertical
ordering of sorts, it puts a dubious historical stamp on sheer fictions
that could be truly disorienting. In an age when, as we know, aspiring
internal colonialists begin the quest for assimilation or overcoming of
others by, first, having to invent whimsy as a verity of times and
tides, it can get quite far reaching. Who needs to be told that such
tides must be stemmed before they harden into inscrutable canon! Or, let
me put it this way: that as someone with an instinctive intellectual
empathy with all ethnic groups craving for self governance, seeking
unity in their ranks or working to disperse the succubus of a unitarised
federalism that rampages across and assaults our God-given and highly
creative diversity, I would seriously invite all Nigerians to abhor the
over-parochial presumption that seeks to put others down in the process
of crafting a new sense of self for any ethnic nationality.
Who can tell what could be made of a cunningly designed myth of ethnic
super-ordinance as a means of turning the freeborn into a non-citizen
in his father's house? This is not just a matter of rhetoric. It raises
questions, not to be taken lightly, in the face of a new Ooni, preaching
unity of the Yoruba people, at a time when dithering Yoruba elites,
annoyingly self-deprecatory in normal times, have been finally goaded by
hard times, to reach the point of agreeing to join in forging a united
economic front around the Odua Investments; with Lagos joining the fold.
It begins to serve as a warning or a threat, however, when a paramount
Oba, such as the Alake, claiming fourth position in the hierarchy of
Yoruba Obas, chooses to flaunt one myth that has been permanently
disputed by a neighbor for as long as it has surfaced. Even for people
who do not normally care about such things, it begins to grate, when it
is realised that such ranking is based on myths that cannot even bear
forensic scrutiny.
Let's face it: between the Edo and the Yoruba, those who wish that all
of us should live by myths can be seen as strategically roughening up
the insuperable distinctiveness of the Edo people within a notion of the
siblinghood of their palaces. What they may not realise, and therefore
need to be told, is that it gets truly atavistic, when others claim you
as sibling only in order to degrade or down-grade what you are. It has
the same kind of feel as the myth which makes a distinction between
Hausa Bakwai and Hausa Banza with a peculiar cunning of history built
into it. It could be worse when it comes from a very unnecessary wish to
assimilate others while negating their interests through a cold
indifference to facts, thus turning whimsical mythology into history.
The good part is that, in an age when History is being displaced by so
much cant, ignored and muddied by those who prefer to re-invent the past
as a means of achieving modern ambitions at other people's expense,
there are criteria of ascertainment of knowledge which can be deployed
to test the veracity of narratives. No matter how cleverly or
high-mindedly such narratives try to overcome what is already known or
knowable, the point is that they can be defeated by invoking the awesome
wealth of information at the behest of contemporary knowledge
industries. I dare say that on this matter of the ranking of the obas,
the saving grace is that all the information needed to decide one way or
the other can be found in debates that have been going on, for decades,
among historians and anthropologists, disquisitions between cultural
philosophers and the search for balance between literary critics.
In my book, In Search of Ogun: Soyinka In Spite of Nietzsche,
(published in 2014) I have pooled together a number of the strands in
order to indicate the necessity for movement away from metaphysical dead
ends and the parochial dredge of many of the arguments which over
privilege inward-looking ethnic issues rather than their universalistic
implications. The point is that ethnic solidarity may be quite a good
workshop for developing values that are relevant for wider activism in
the promotion of shared human values, but the latter must always be
properly minded to obviate the tendency for self-apprehension to be
turned into the case of a snake eating its own tail unto death.
I see it as a case for unveiling supposedly esoteric or secret
knowledge, making public property of arcane issues of cults and
conclaves, such that, for instance, we can appreciate the reality of
Yoruba people who may worship a deified Edo personage; Edo people who
are devotees of a Yoruba god; and the treason of history which can
confront people of different ethnic groups, even enemy nationalities,
with the reality of a common ancestor. In Soyinka In Spite of
Nietzsche, I contend with principles and values that promise astute
approaches to management science and management of society by looking
through and beyond positions that are derivable from the gods our
ancestors worshipped.
I am concerned that it is because we do not always keep the right
perspectives on such matters that, adding the ranking of obas, we run
into major altercations. For the purpose of this write-up, my intention
is to dwell less on metaphysics and issues of cultural philosophies. I
wish to engage current issues by recalling and engaging one of the many
altercations that came to a head in 2004, yielding a big blow-out
between Ooni Olubuse and Oba Erediauwa, after the latter's publication
of his autobiography, I REMAIN, SIR, YOUR OBEDIENT SERVANT in which he
devoted a chapter to 'The Benin-Ife Connection'.
In that particular chapter of the book, Oba Erediauwa questions the
veracity of the two versions of the origins of the Benin monarchy that
came from Egharevba's authoritative and highly regarded A SHORT HISTORY
OF BENIN. In the first edition, Egharevba wrote: "Many many years ago,
Odua (Oduduwa) of Uhe (Ile-Ife), the father and progenitor of the Yoruba
kings sent his eldest son Obagodo - who took the title of Ogiso - with a
large retinue all the way from Uhe to found a Kingdom in this part of
the world".
..."And in the fourth (and now current) edition of the book, the late
author wrote: "Many, many years ago, the Binis came all the way from
Egypt to found a more secure shelter in this part of the world after a
short stay in the Sudan and at Ile-Ife, which the Benin people called
Uhe...The rulers or kings were commonly known as "Ogiso" before the
arrival of Oduduwa and his party at Ife in Yorubaland, about the 12th
century of the Christian era".
Anyone reading the two versions in the first and fourth editions will
be tempted to agree with Erediauwa that there were interpolations that
amounted to a bias in the narrative. One may not agree with Erediauwa's
claim that Egharevba's "Edo ne'kue (Edo-Akure - partly Benin partly
Yoruba....) blood in the man manifested itself" or that the editors,
"the experts in the Ibadan University contributed to the
contradictions". But it is too obvious that something happened to the
narrative that is quite out of sync with the authority on display.
Erediauwa simply avers that "the earliest rulers or kings in what is
today Edo or Benin were known as "Ogiso". The first was known as Ogiso
Igodo and the last (of the thirty one or so of them) was Ogiso Owodo,
the father of Ekaladeran who became known as Oduduwa in Ife. In essence,
Oduduwa came after the Ogisos. Not before. According to Erediauwa, the
idea of a Benin Prince choosing a title in order to be king did not even
begin in Benin History until after Oduduwa's youngest son, Oramiyan,
fathered a child, the dumb one, in Benin, who literally gave himself a
name when on winning a game of akhue he gave a shout of victory,
OWOMIKA,"my hand has struck it", his first intelligible speech.
The Benin people corrupted the name and it became Eweka. Also, it
became tradition, thereafter, for every king-to-be to go to Use, the
site of the game of akhue, to choose a name before climbing the throne.
So to say, Egharevba, whom we all owe so much, got it all mixed up. As
Edo traditions have it, Ogiso Owodo was advised by the oracle to have
his son Ekaladeran executed for being the source of the unhappiness in
the land during his reign. Unaware that he was being deceived, he sent
the public executioner, Oka Odionmwan, to do the job. But the
executioner decided to have pity on Ekaladeran and "on reaching the
outskirts of the city" let him off. From there the prince wandered into
the world, settling alone, first in Ughoton, where the elders gave him
hospitality, before he moved to a village on the outskirts of Ile-Ife.
When his Igodo people first learnt of his being alive and went
searching for him, they found him living as leader in one of the
stranger settlements outside the main bowl of Ife. 'Oke Ora (Ora Hill)
between Ile Ife and Ilesha', insists Ade Obayemi. Although Adebanji
Akintoye in his A HISTORY OF THE YORUBA PEOPLE, does not attend to the
claim that Oduduwa came from Benin, he posits that it was from the
settlement outside the Bowl of Ife that Oduduwa moved down into the city
with his party to occupy one of the key stranger quarters, pooling them
together until he became leader of all the stranger elements. He moved
against the autochthons, and seized power. The seizure of power is
acknowledged by all the authorities on Ife history. It led to the exile
of Obatala and his party of autochthons; it led to famine as can be
imagined if the earth tillers go on awwol. Even after the crisis
appeared resolved and Obatala returned, he had to function under
Oduduwa's authority.
Many of his followers, like Obameri, moved to Oduduwa's side. Diehard
supporters of Obatala like Obawinrin who could not take it and continued
to fight, were beaten out of the Ife Bowl into Igbo Igbo of the rain
forest. As Erediauwa puts it: "It is a historical fact, known I believe
to present-day Ife people, that the original settlers whom Ekaladeran
(Oduduwa) met moved away from Ife to a place called Ugbo, a very ancient
Ilaje town in Okitipupa area. Ife elders, especially the traditional
title holders, must know the rest of the Ugbo episode as it affects Ife
and Oduduwa because Ife people today perform a ritual festival that
re-enacts the events that caused the original settlers including their
village head to flee from Ife and Ekaladeran (or Oduduwa) to become the
head of the community".
For that matter, it is claimed by some contemporary Nigerian historians
that many of the areas which answer Igbo in their names across Yoruba
land were redoubts of resistant groups belonging to the Igbo, led by
Obatala. Adiele Afigbo, not by any chance a frivolous historian, has
argued that the expulsion of the Igbo from Ife was not just myth but
history as the movement of Igbo people from the western side of the
Niger to the eastern side of the river was a consequence of that
fracturing, terrorism, a virtual mfecane, that took place with Oduduwa's
overcoming of the indigenes. In the end, both Obatala and Oduduwa were
deified and some kind of patching up of the narratives have been
attempted by successive generations to hide the fact that there was a
grand fissure. But that is where myth comes into its own. Such that on
page 57 of his book, Adebanji Akintoye, without dwelling on how it was
possible, comes to the conclusion that "It is on the soil of Yorubaland
that Oduduwa was born and raised; it is only in that soil that his roots
can be found". We may well shrug. Such an understanding obviously led
Ade Ajayi in a Vanguard interview on May 16, 2004, to insist that
although more researches still need to be done, "people can’t just wake
up one day and say that Oduduwa must have been a Benin Prince that they
wanted to execute, ran and ran to a village and you call Ife a village?"
Ade Ajayi adds: "Who is the Oba of Benin to come and tell the Yorubas
what they should believe about themselves? I think it is very very wrong
and impertinent to assume that you know more about the Yoruba people
than the Yoruba know about themselves. On what basis? What information
could he have? When he says from his studies, what did he study? What
books? Is it in the colonial days or before then or it’s the books
written by educated Yoruba people of the 19th century?"
What cannot bear scrutiny, because it must crumble, is Egharevba's
Obagodo hypothesis which attempts to impose a theory of Yoruba origins
on the kings of Igodomigodo in a period that shares parallel sorties
with the era of the first sixteen kings of Ife before the arrival of
Oduduwa. That era, of which Obatala was the last of sixteen kings in
Ife and Owodo, the father of Oduduwa, was the last of thirty one kings
in Igodomigodo, ought to be properly matched, not confused, if only
because it puts in proper perspective the arrival of Oduduwa's son,
Oramiyan, and his three lunar months as ruler, that changed the name of
the city from Igodomigodo to Benin, before the city was renamed as Edo
by the great great grand child, Ogun Ewuare, in the 15th century.
At any rate, talking serious history, rather than mythologies, no
self-respecting historian, in our century, buys the hoary stuff about
the Yoruba progenitor coming from Egypt, Mecca, the Sudan or which ever
zone is supposed to provide aristocractic effect or ancient, sacralised,
historical identity that affirms greatness of a people. Whether in
Johnson's History of the Yoruba, Biobaku's valiant efforts or F. Ade
Ajayi's embarrassingly un-researched put-down of Erediauwa's narrative
as uninformed, they amount to the purveyance of a Hamitic thesis, a
local variant of which I have called the Obagodo hypothesis, which have
been smashed by dedicated Yoruba historians since I. A. Akinjogbin and
his co-revolutionary historians.(See CRADLE OF A RACE) They have long
moved beyond all the romantic historicism of the earlier foragers in
oral traditions. Ade Obayemi, in particular, was among the first radical
dissenters from the received myths who realized that Oduduwa could not
have come from outside the world of the Niger Benue confluence.
Keen dredgers of the history of Ile Ife like Isola Olomola, reached the
same conclusion: Ife was a centre that attracted people from far and
wide before Oduduwa came amongst them and literally scattered the
system of cooperative governance under the chairmanship of Obatala who
would later be deified as god of creation or creativity, a lover of wine
whose devotees are advised against alcohol.
The question no one has answered is how it was possible for Oduduwa to
have been born in Yorubaland and still be described as a stranger by all
Ife traditions, by Ifa, and those who like Olubushe II, accept the
romance that Oduduwa came from Mecca, Egypt, Sudan or from the sky, with
a chain. What cannot be escaped is that not knowing where Oduduwa came
from is at the heart of the matter. Rejecting, instead of researching,
what must now be called the Erediauwa thesis which argues that Oduduwa
was a Prince of Igodomigodo, does not help matters. Once the ranking
of the obas in Yorubaland comes into the picture, the issue gets
over-loaded. The Erediauwa/Benin story just happens to be the only one
available that tells Oduduwa's story with some certitude. Reject it or
not, it still does not affect the critical aspect of the narrative which
indicates that Oduduwa actually sent his youngest son, Oramiyan, to
Igodo whether in response to a distress call or because he saw a vacuum
and decided to fill it. Oramiyan's three months in Benin was too full of
troubles that he could not resolve. He left in annoyance, damning the
people as a people of intrigues and quarrels, Ile-ibinu, which only a
child born amongst them could tackle or accommodate. But he left a
pregnant woman behind whom Oduduwa had to send procurers and minders for
until she delivered. The child turned out dumb and could not speak
until that famous game of akhue when he gave a shout of victory that
earned him the name, Eweka, which started a dynasty.
What all the traditions, and therefore History, vouchsafes is that
Oramiyan, on his return journey made stop overs at various stations but
pooled his forces together at Kaltunga/Oyo where he begat the Alafin,
and started another dynasty. He eventually returned to Ife and became
the king after the death of Oduduwa. Shall we say, he rounded the
circle. From Ife back to Ife. What is not denied by any authority is
that all the Kings of Benin, Oyo and Ife, thereafter had the same
ancestor. Unless, ethnic pride, sheer narrative mischief and ugly cult
disorders enter the picture, how is it possible in the narration of the
folklore, myth, or history, to rank the three dynasties and not follow
the order in which they were established and acknowledged at Ile Ife!
Which odu of Ifa tells us a different story other than the one that
accepts the chronology just adumbrated! So, there is no denying it:
whether you believe the Ekaladeran story or not, you have to accept that
Oduduwa sent his youngest son who thereafter displaced all the older
sons, overtook them, and made them invisible to the claims of history.
Those who are not Oramiyan's children may well kick and seek another
ranking that puts them in the picture. But they have no locus because it
is actually Oramiyan's children who built the empires that survived the
ravages of history. Among those children, as has always been accepted
by ALL AUTHORITIES, the Benin Monarch came first. To do a somersault
about it and seek to make Eweka appear like the third in the hierarchy
is simply jiggery pokery, rigging, and sheer distortion of History. When
Ade Ajayi says that Oba Erediauwa's "own father used to attend and
meet at the conference of Yoruba obas regularly during colonial rule",
he is quite right. Ajayi adds, truculently however that Oba Akenzua,
Erediauwa's "own father did not object to this but he (Erediauwa) from
his own point of view of politics thinks it is a departure from his own
status ....." and " that Ife monarchy is derived from Benin monarchy".
The truth of the matter is that even if anyone rejects the fact "that
Ife Monarchy is derived from Igodo monarchy", it changes nothing about
the reality that the Monarchy in Benin City is still Number One among
Oduduwa's children. I mean: let it be assumed that Oduduwa came from
Egypt, Mecca, Sudan, Ethiopia (where the Oromo Region has a nationality
fraction called Oromiyas) or from Orun, as heaven or a place we do not
know, with a chain made of iron if not some other metal, it does not
change the fact that the dumb one who learnt to talk by naming himself
OWOMIKA, 'my hand has stuck it', the first Benin monarch after the
Ogisos, was the first child of Oramiyan whose children built the empires
that our part of the world remembers.
No question about it: there is the other significant issue that whoever
becomes the Ooni of Ife is closest to the Opa Oranyan, and therefore
must be deemed the preserver of the family grain, the shrine of
nativity. A special place may therefore be reserved for him in the
celebration of the family business which monarchy always is, in every
culture where it exists. It does not however remove from the eldest
child the imprimatur that age provides. At any rate, Edo culture has
been, for centuries, a strict upholder of the principle of primogeniture
and therefore some remove from parleying with those who have no respect
for the firstborn adult male in the matter of monarchical rule. The
reality is that whenever the Oba of Benin sat among Yoruba obas, he
knew he was the eldest. He did not have to say it for it to be true.
Those who deny him his place may stand on ethnic arrogance, which is
hollow. The rest of the world knows that if there are other forms of
prowess that can grant suzerainty, superiority or primacy to a king, the
Edo king had and has it. In a century when governance is based on
democracy by numbers, it may well be argued that the Edo people do not
have as much population as the Yoruba to decide the matter. But matters
pertaining to monarchies are not resolved by a democracy of numbers. A
king is a king because he is the child of who he is. Or if he can impose
his will, by rod and staff. If the latter is the tack of those who
continue to engage in the ranking of Yoruba obas, the average Edo can
then invoke the Edebiri principle which advises that the Oba of Benin is
not a Yoruba and therefore cannot be placed on a list of Yoruba Obas.
